Students under lockdown: Comparisons of students’ social networks and mental health before and during the COVID-19 crisis in Switzerland
By Timon Elmer, Kieran Mepham, Christoph Stadtfeld. PLoS ONE, 2020
1,234 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This study investigates students’ social networks and mental health before and at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, using longitudinal data collected since 2018. We analyze change on multiple dimensions of social networks (interaction, friendship, social support, co-studying) and mental health indicators (depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness) within two cohorts of Swiss undergraduate students experiencing the crisis (N = 212), and make additional comparisons to an earlier cohort which did not experience the crisis (N = 54). In within-person comparisons we find that interaction and co-studying networks had become sparser, and more students were studying alone. Furthermore, students’ levels of stress, anxiety, loneliness, and depressive symptoms got worse, compared to measures before the crisis. Stressors shifted from fears of missing out on social life to worries about health, family, friends, and their future. Exploratory analyses suggest that COVID-19 specific worries, isolation in social networks, lack of interaction and emotional support, and physical isolation were associated with negative mental health trajectories. Female students appeared to have worse mental health trajectories when controlling for different levels of social integration and COVID-19 related stressors. As universities and researchers discuss future strategies on how to combine on-site teaching with online courses, our results indicate the importance of considering social contacts in students’ mental health and offer starting points to identify and support students at higher risk of social isolation and negative psychological effects during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f4eefbc67c748af2eafeeae3466bb9b5b23ebe1
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Citations in the corpus
- Lockdown fatigue among college students during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Predictive role of personal resilience, coping behaviors, and health (2020, background): “, stress, anxiety, depression) related to the COVID‐19 pandemic among college students in China,(53) the USA,(54) and Switzerland.(34) In a recent study involving college students, high levels of fatigue due to social distancing measures were attributed to lower social connectedness with peers and f”
- Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Life of Higher Education Students: A Global Perspective (2020, background): “Since social support is vital for the mental health of higher education students, it should be efficiently offered and carefully maintained during a time of isolation and/or quarantine [7,33,88].”
- College Students Mental Health Challenges: Concerns and Considerations in the COVID-19 Pandemic (2021, background): “Elmer et al. (2020), conducted a study to compare the mental health and social well-being of college students in a Swiss university.”